Stern handed him a piece of paper and he fixed his pincenez to study the figures.
Ah, my eyesight is deteriorating.
Degenerating.
Damascus this time.
Yes.
When?
By the middle of June if you can do it.
Easily.
And I'd like to set up a meeting here in September.
I don't blame you at all, it's a lovely place to be in September. Who is going to have the pleasure of visiting here and meeting me?
A man who works for me in Palestine.
Fine, guests from the Holy Land are always especially welcome. Is he on your Arab side or your Jewish side?
Neither.
Ah, from a more obscure region of your multiple personality. Druse perhaps?
No.
Armenian?
No.
He can't be Greek, I'd already know him.
He isn't.
Arab Christian?
No.
Not a Turk?
No.
Well we've accounted for the main non-European elements of Smyrna society so he must be some kind of European.
Some kind. Irish.
Sivi reached down beside the bed and brought up a bottle of raid and two glasses.
Doctor, I thought you might prescribe something like this so I had it ready just in case. You are aware how well the Greek army is doing in the interior?
I am.
And precisely when things are going well, along you come introducing a volatile Irish possibility? Do you have any immediate plans for China? Not that it matters, I wouldn't visit either of those outlandish places.
I'm staying right here on the beautiful shores of the Aegean until I'm cured.
Your granny, said Stern, raising his glass.
Indeed, intoned Sivi, and quite right too. Not only have I never denied it, I wouldn't have it any other way.
In the autumn of 1929 Stern went down to the Jordan, to a small house on the outskirts of Jericho to meet a man he hadn't seen in several years, an Arab from Amman who was active among the bedouin tribes in the Moabite hills. Although he was a year or two younger than Stern he looked far older. Sitting very still, no bigger than a child, his large dark eyes were flat and opaque in the feeble light thrown by the single candle.
A steady wind rattled the windows and swallowed the sounds of the rivers in the darkness. The Arab spoke in whispers, frequently halting to cover his mouth with a rag. Stern looked away when that happened or rummaged in his papers, pretending not to notice how much worse the man's lungs had become. After settling their arrangements they sat silently over coffee, listening to the wind.
You look tired, the Arab said at last.
It's just that I've been traveling and haven't had much sleep. Won't that wind ever stop?
After midnight. For a few hours. It begins again then.
The Arab's lips smiled weakly but there was no expression in his eyes.
I no longer even cough. It's not far away.
You'll have your own government soon and that's not far away either. Fifteen years you've been working for it, just imagine, and now it's really going to happen.
Stiff, thin, wasted, the tiny figure stared at him through dead eyes, the rag clutched near his mouth.
Before you came. Tonight. I wasn't thinking of Amman. It's strange. Concerns change. I was thinking how we've never known each other. Why?
I suppose it's the nature of our work. We hurry back and forth, meet for an hour, hurry on again. There's never any time to talk about other things.
For fifteen years?
It seems so.
You help us. You help the Jews too. I've known that. Who are you really working for?
Stern wasn't surprised by the question. All evening the man had talked in a disconnected dreamlike way, drifting from topic to topic. He supposed it had something to do with the Arab's illness, his awareness of it.
For us. Our people.
In my hills that means your own tribe. With suspicion, a few neighboring tribes. For you?
All of us, all the Arabs and Jews together.
It's not possible.
But it is.
The man didn't have the strength to shake his head. Jerusalem, he whispered and stopped for lack of breath. A boy, he said after a moment. A garden. A football.
Stern gazed at the wall and tried not to hear the wind. Two months before at the end of the summer a boy had accidentally kicked a football into a garden, nothing at all but the boy was a Jew and the garden an Arab's and it happened in the Old City. A mere football, it was grotesque. The Arab saw the foot of Zionism on his soil and the boy was stabbed to death on the spot. In Hebron an Arab mob used axes to butcher sixty Jews, including children. In Safad twenty more, including children. Before the riots were over a hundred and thirty Jews dead and a hundred and fifteen Arabs dead, the Jews killed by Arabs and the Arabs killed by the English police, a boy and a football and a garden.
All the Semites? whispered the man. All together? The Armenians are Christians. What has become of them? Where were their Christian brothers during those massacres?
Stern shifted in his chair. Somehow he couldn't bring himself to find the words. What was the point anyway of arguing with a man who would be dead in a week or a month? He rubbed his eyes and didn't say anything, listening to the wind.
The Arab broke the silence by changing the subject again, not really looking for answers or even hearing them, beyond that now, straying from thought to thought as they occurred to him.
The classics. You often quote from them. Why? Did you start out as a scholar too? I did.
Stern stirred. He felt uneasy. It must have been the incessant noise of the wind pushing on his mind.
No. My father was. I guess I have a habit of repeating things he used to say.
Perhaps I've heard of him. I read a lot once. What was his name?
Lost, murmured Stern. Lost. A man of the desert. Many deserts.
But the accent. You have a trace of one.
The Yemen. I grew up there.
Barren hills. Stony soil. Not like the Jordan valley.
No, not like it. Not at all.
Stern slumped lower in his chair. The overpowering wind outside made it impossible for him to keep his thoughts together. He realized he was beginning to talk in the abrupt manner of the dying man across from him. A wind blowing down the valley to the Dead Sea and Aqaba.
For no reason he saw his father striding into Aqaba eighty years ago after marching the length of the Sinai without food or water, unaware he had walked through three dawns and two sunsets until he found a dog yapping at his heels, smiling then when a shepherd boy told him so and asked him whether he was a good genie or a bad genie, as a reward relating to the boy an obscure tale from the Thousand and One Nights before striding on, Strongbow the genie, many men in many places, truly a vast and changeable spirit as his grandfather had once said.
What? No. I didn't get this from him. Not like us. No. He became a hakim in his latter years. First a scholar, then a hakim.
Better professions, whispered the Arab. Better than ours. Especially the healer. Healer of souls. I would have liked that. But today, you and I. We don't have time. Is that so? Just an excuse we give ourselves?
Stern started to reach for his cigarettes and then remembered. If only the man hadn't mentioned the Armenians. Why did that have to have come up tonight? It always had this effect on him, the memory of the afternoon in a garden in Smyrna, that night on the quay and the Armenian girl soaked in blood whispering please, her thin neck and the knife and the crowds and the screams and the shadows, the fires and the smoke and the knife.
His hands were beginning to shake, it was happening all over again. He tried to bury them in his pockets and squeeze his fists closed but it didn't help, the wind outside wouldn't stop.
The hakim, a huge presence sitting behind a trembling young man at dawn somewhere in the desert half a century ago, telling the frightened man to turn and face the emptiness in all its vastness, to fix his eye on a distant eagle swooping in the first light of day living a thousand years, tracing the journey of the Prophet, the footsteps a man takes from the day of his birth to the day of his death, suggesting the swirls of the Koran shaping and unshaping themselves as waves in the desert and saying Yes, the oasis may be small but yes, we will find it, yes.